Like my mods and tools?

Then you might consider helping me out. There are some things that need to taken care of every month (like a roof over the head, electricity and internet) plus we can always use more tools and equipment. Your use of our mods and tools makes me happy, but if you want to show additional appreciation, you might consider buying me a slice of pizza or two.

Remember, the definition of a programmer is:

pro·gram·mer (n) An organism capable of converting caffeine and pizza into code.

Making Progress

Yes, like a crazy mad scientist, I continue to make progress on UWE. The first step was deciding on what direction to take our data handling. Since we lost the database with the last host, I was given a chance to rethink things. One of my personal pet peves was having to have two different logins…one for the site and one of UWE. That also meant that you would have to have another login for any other multiplayer game we made down the road.

I had been wanting to tie all that info together anyway, so I made the choice to unify the user login system. That came with it’s own set of challenges, that we had to overcome to adapt the UWE client’s login to use a different database and to not handle the process of actually logging in, but it also has eliminated some of the nagging issues we were experiencing as well.

Now, when you launch the UWE client, it checks to see if you are logged into the site, and if so you go straight in…no forms, no typing, no clicking. If not, you’re taken to the IPG login page. Also, if you’ve been gone too long or your session is invalidated for some reason, but you are still logged into the site, you aren’t thrown back to a login screen and have to type in stuff…it just quickly flashes that it’s checking your login and boom…right back to the game.

Also, this allows me to unify some of the admin functions into the site itself, making it easier to do some of the housekeeping on users and means I don’t have to re-invent the wheel when adding in admin controls. And, down the road, the IPG currency will be centralized and will carry over from game to game, once we get to that point.

Chat is working, in that you can read and send chat messages, and the user permissions are working (if you have admin permission, the client knows it, etc). I just need to write the chat processor to figure out what title/color your chat name should have and to add in custom color/title ability into the Admin interface, then add back in the news section and….bam. We’re back where we were and I can start working on the engine again. At that point, I’ll put the link to the client where people can get to it and you can play around with it.

In the meantime, Dezeroth is starting to work on some art for the game so hopefully it’ll start taking shape soon. Even if it doesn’t, I’m going to get the engine started and we’ll go from there.